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Best-selling author David Shields to give reading

October 31, 2013

Best-selling author David Shields to give reading

David Shields, New York Times best-selling author, will read at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 12, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the Penn State University Park campus. Part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading series, this event is free and open to the public.

Shields is the author of 15 books, including the recently published "Salinger" (co-authored with Shane Salerno, Simon & Schuster, September 2013), "How Literature Saved My Life" (Knopf, February 2013), "The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead" (a NYT bestseller) and "Reality Hunger: A Manifesto" (reissued in paperback by Vintage in 2011) — a book that challenges our most basic assumptions about originality, authenticity and creativity.

His other books include "Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season," a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; "Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity," winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and "Dead Languages: A Novel," winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. He co-edited an anthology with Bradford Morrow, titled "The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death" (Norton, 2011). He also co-edited "FAKES: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, 'Found' Texts and Other Dubious Documents" (Norton, 2012).

Shields has appeared on programs such as "The Colbert Report." His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Salon, and Slate. Shields's work has been translated into 15 languages.

Among other awards, Shields has received a Guggenheim fellowship and two NEA fellowships. He is the Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington and also is a member of the faculty in Warren Wilson College’s low-residency MFA Program for Writers, in Asheville, N.C. Shields graduated from Brown University magna cum laude with a degree in English literature. He received his MFA in Fiction with Honors from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1980.

The reading is sponsored by Penn State’s Department of English. Additional sponsorship for this event is provided by Steven Fisher, a 1970 Penn State graduate, the Mary E. Rolling Endowment, the Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Endowment, University Libraries, and the College of the Liberal Arts.